David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

IBM's Analytics University (held in both Miami and Stockholm) brought about some large changes. Big announcements this year included a consolidation of IBM's Watson Analytics into Cognos 11.1, helping provide some clarity to their analytics offerings, along with new visualizations and better data preparation. This also includes a new conversational assistant to help generate narrative explanations of displays and interactive queries.For the full breakdown of IBM's Analytics University 2018, and my analysis of all the largest announcements, watch my latest hot take.

Once again I attended Tableau's Users Conference, along with 17,000 other attendees, affectionately self-referred to as "data nerds". Pushing the envelope in data capabilities and access, Tableau introduced the "Ask Data" feature, allowing users to prose natural language queries and receive a response, along with new data preparation capabilities and other enhancements to help data analysts. Further, Tableau announced new developer enhancements including a new developer program to better align tools built for Tableau with Tableau's interface. For the full breakdown of Tableau User Conference 2018, and my analysis of all the largest announcements, watch my hot take video.

This year, Teradata rebranded the Teradata users conference from "Partners" to "Analytics Universe", and there is a reason for it. For decades, Teradata has represented the high end of the analytic database, but new innovations and technologies are adding flexibility to Teradata's licensing as they compete. For the full breakdown of Teradata's Analytics Universe 2018, and my analysis of all the largest announcements, watch my hot take video.

In 2017 Strata + Hadoop World was changed to theStrata Data Conference. As I pointed out in mycoverage of last year’s event, the focus was largely on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). That theme continued this year, but my impression of the event was of a community looking to get value out of data regardless of the technology being used to manage that data. The change was subtle: The location was the same; the exhibitors were largely the same; attendance was similar this year and last. But there was no particular vendor or technology dominating the event.

All too often, software vendors view analytics as the end rather than the beginning of a process. I’m reminded of some of the advanced math classes I’ve taken in which the teaching process focused on a few key aspects of a mathematical proof or solution, leaving the rest of the exercise to be worked out by the students. In other contexts, you may hear people say the numbers speak for themselves.

We at Ventana Research recently publishedour research agendas for 2018. The world of data and information management continues to evolve, as does our research on the use of these technologies to improve your organization’s operations. Relational databases are no longer the only viable enterprise data store as more organizations adopt a polyglot database infrastructure. And while their exact form may still be changing, as I haverecently written, big data technologies are here to stay. OurData and Analytics in the Cloud Benchmark Research indicates that an increasing number of organizations are opting for cloud-based deployments: A modern data infrastructure includes a hybrid of on-premises and cloud deployments for 44 percent of organizations. Our upcoming research will track how these changes are affecting data- and information-management processes.

We at Ventana Researchrecently published our research agendas for 2018. Analytics and business intelligence are evolving and so is our research on their use across practice areas. Earlier research has shown that analytics can deliver significant value to organizations; for example, ourpredictive analytics research shows that 57 percent of organizations reported achieving a competitive advantage and half created new revenue opportunities with predictive analytics. Waves of investment in self-service analytics have propelled the market for analytics tools, significantly empowering line-of-business organizations to create their own analytics and set their own analytic priorities. But organizations are also beginning to recognize some of the limitations of current analytics implementations – for self-service, forexample. OurData Preparation Benchmark Research reveals that fewer than half (42%) of organizations are comfortable allowing business users to work with data not prepared by IT. Our research this year will continue to explore both the successes and challenges organizations face as they continue to use analytics and BI.

Ventana Research recently published the findings of ourbenchmark research on Data Preparation, which examines the practices organizations use to accomplish data preparation. We view data preparation as a sequence of steps: identifying, locating and then accessing the data; aggregating data from different sources; and enriching, transforming and cleaning it to create a single uniform data set. Using data to accomplish organizational goals requires that it be prepared for use; to do this job properly, businesses need flexible tools that enable them to enrich the context of data drawn from multiple sources and collaborate on its preparation as well as ensure security and consistency. Users of data preparation tools range from analysts to operations professionals in the lines of business to IT professionals.

I recently attended SAP TechEd in Las Vegas to hear the latest from the company regarding its analytics and business intelligence offerings as well as its data management platform. The company used the event to launchSAP Data Hub and made several other data and analytics announcements that I’ll cover below.

The Strata Data Conference is changing and it’s changing in a good way. At the recent Strata Data Conference in New York, Mike Olson, chief strategy officer at Cloudera, which co-sponsored the event, commented that at prior events we used to talk about the “Hadoop zoo animals,” meaning the various components of the Hadoop ecosystem of which I have written previously. Following last fall’s Strata event, I observed that the conference was evolving to focus on the use of data. Advancing that evolution, this year’s event focused on a particular type of usage: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The evolution from a focus on zoo animals to a focus on business value using advanced analytics shows further maturation of the big data market.

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About the Analyst

David Menninger

David brings to Ventana Research over twenty-five years of experience, through which he has marketed and brought to market some of the leading edge technologies for helping organizations analyze data to support a range of action-taking and decision-making processes.